One night at WHOtv leads to more

I helped WHOtv with the 2010 elections by updating their ticker with the latest information on each race. It was a great experience. There, I met weekday night news anchors Erin Kiernan, and John Bachman. While stationed at my computer I sat next to Alisa Link, who is a multimedia producer. She populates their website and also oversees their social media sites.

I'm not too shy when meeting people, luckily neither was she so breaking the ice was not a concern. It had already melt at 'hello'. She told me that I had made a good decision to volunteer to help because in the media business it's good to get your name out there as soon as possible.

She interned for WHO in 2007 writing scripts for the sports anchors, researching possible story lines for them, along with administrative work and data collecting. She received the job she has now by staying in contact with Sports Director Keith Murphy at WHO. When the position opened up he asked if she would be interested right away.

Before I left to go back to Simpson she gave me her email address and told me to keep in touch. That we did. The night of the Indianola standoff during last semester I emailed her telling her that I was following her updates online. She messaged back that she actually had the day off, but will give the assignment director my information in case anything happened. It all depended on where he would like to go with the story so I wasn't really expecting a call back. Less than half an hour later I received a phone call from WHO reporter Jannay Towne. I didn't give her much information. What I knew, she did too.  That was the last time I talked to Alisa, until last Saturday.

Now for my story. Last Saturday I received an email from Alisa asking if I would be interested in writing stories for WHO's Community Pages. These new Community Pages is basically an extension of WHO's website but has more specific news about the city in which you live. What I will be doing is posting stories about what is happening specifically in Indianola and Simpson College community.

I'll be starting sometime this week hopefully. As soon as their web guy gets me registered into the system and I go in to get trained. My job for now: think of some good story ideas and start looking at leads.

I'd like to extend a huge thank you to Alisa.

That my friends, is how connections work.